This type of kiosk was recommended to us by TJ Heinricy, Streets & Parks Supervisor with the City of Northfield. (There’s a similar one in the Babcock Park dog park just across the Cannon River. ) Since this portion of the park is in the flood plain, he thought it best to avoid anything too fancy and anything made of wood. CROCT paid for it ($475) and TJ covered the not-so-insignificant shipping costs out of his parks budget.

CROCT member and uber volunteer Bill Nelson took charge of the kiosk installation yesterday. I was his marginally adequate helper:

We began reworking the Sechler skills park beam skinny a couple weeks ago (blog post here). In the past week, our friends Matt and Jon Feldman at Cannon River Tree Care went out of their way to drop some logs at the gate to the skills park. So CROCT Dirt Boss/El Presidente Marty Larson and I used one of them with the available beams to reconfigure an intermediate-to-advanced-level beam/log/beam combination skinny:

A few days later, CROCT uber-volunteer Bill Nelson put a fresh chain on his chainsaw and flattened the pine log between the beams. The skinny can be ridden either direction but it’s designed to be a progressively harder challenge when riding it south/towards the ball fields:

We’ve temporarily rolled the other logs together into a sizable logover. With the addition of a short beam at one end, the pile also provides a difficult skinny challenge:

I polled our ridership last month, asking them to indicate which weekend days in Feb. would work for them to participate in a group ride along MORC’s Minnesota River Bottoms trail in Bloomington. Yesterday, ten of us showed up at 1pm at the Lyndale Ave/I35W trailhead. This group photo in the parking lot was taken by Pat Sorenson, president of Penn Cycle who happened to be heading out on a ride with some buddies at the same time:

So we organized a small trail work crew today, including two guys with the best electric chainsaw 2017 has to offer: Bill Nelson and Dave Nygren. Unfortunately, after they sliced the end off the log, we discovered that it was starting to rot. So it didn’t make sense to put all the work into slicing it flat for an intermediate-level skinny. So instead, they scored the top of it to make it an advanced level skinny. Likewise, a narrow log skinny next to it:

We still have to construct a ramp of sorts to make it easier to get up onto the bigger skinny. We have the log pieces ready but the ice and frozen dirt prevented us from making it stable.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for another log that would be a good candidate for a beginner/intermediate-level skinny.